A first-person narrator named Latimer announces that his end is fast approaching and so he will use what time he has left to “the strange story of my experience.” So what the reader is perusing becomes, essentially, is the final testament of a dying man. It is what makes this final testament compelling enough to read on which the novel lives or dies. The central question becomes what was so strange about Latimer’s life that it is worth using any of my hours to read.
Cue the squiggly lines which indicates a flashback in cinematic form. And if this were a modern day movie, the flashback would indicate that this is going to be the origin story of a superhero since the movement backward in time takes the reader all the way back to when a nineteen-year-old Latimer realized that he had a superpower. It is not such an origin story, of course, and it is not referred to as a superpower. It is, however, termed by the narrator as “superadded consciousness.” The powerful addition to normal, everyday consciousness is the power to see future events taking place before they actually occur. The initial presentation of this ability occurs when he has a vision of being introduced to Bertha Grant, his older brother’s bride-to-be. A very short time later, the vision plays out in reality just as it had inside his vision. Except that in his vision, he didn’t faint.
That the first occurrence of this power which has apparently lain dormant for nearly two decades before manifesting is engendered by seeing a woman in his vision that he has never seen before, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Latimer’s strange story is going to focus at least a little on his own affection for his brother’s fiancé. And, in fact, Latimer becomes infatuated and fixated on Bertha to the point that today he might even be suspected of being a stalker. Bertha doesn’t think so, however. She is actually quite entertained and pleased by the romantic attentions of two brothers. Even so, she projects an attitude of indifference. And then Latimer has another vision. This time he is not seeing mere minutes into the future, but many years. And Bertha is projecting something far different than indifference. With a vicious malevolence in her voice, she suggests quite strongly that it would better for everyone if he would be so kind as to go somewhere and kill himself. Tough words, to be sure, but there a kicker: in this future, Bertha is not his brother’s wife, but his own!
Of course, if Latimer’s response to this horrific vision of his own destiny was to get as far away from Bertha as possible at least until she had become his sister-in-law, there probably would not be a story so strange it was worth reading. Instead, Latimer ignores the vision. In what may be the first and only time in the history of fiction, sexual desire wins out over rational logic. Seriously, though, fulfilling one’s immediate desires takes precedence over a potential fate that may or may not come true and that quite possibly can—or possibly cannot—be altered. That latter potential is almost immediately put to the test, however, when Albert mounts a horse and takes a fall. A fatal fall which leaves Bertha untethered from marital intentions.
Just as predicted by vision, the former Miss Grant does become a member of the family through marriage. And, just as predicted, the transaction does not turn out as hoped. Once legally conjoined, it doesn’t take long for Latimer to see what Bertha’s former position as an object of sexual desire had blinded him to: her self-centered shallow qualities hiding a poisonous personality. He loses interest in her and Bertha loses interest in monogamy. The result of this tension is that Bertha’s time is most spent away from home while Latimer becomes something of a recluse. Worse than merely being another husband whose wife is stepping out on him while he constructs a nest of isolation and alienation as much as possible is the fact that he now becomes obsessed with his vision of how this misery finally concludes. Or, to put it bluntly: he becomes a man for whom fate has lost its mystery. Living in an intensifying environment of dread of the day when that vision comes true makes the realization of that moment the high point of any dramatic tension left to his existence. And then the day finally arrives and, as projected in his mind all those years ago, Bertha suggests he commit suicide. What could be worse than knowing the sad reality of your future beforehand, knowing you could possibly have changed it, and then watching as it predictably plays out exactly as seen? Only one thing, of course.
The moment when Bertha tells him to kill himself comes and goes with climax. The miserable circumstances of his life before that day is neither nor more less miserable the day after. The moment that was to finally become the unseen turning point of his existence arrives as scheduled and proceeds as promised but changes absolutely nothing. In fact, that singular moment of extraordinary fateful significance becomes, in the reality of all that has taken place between the vision and the realization of the vision, just another entry in the diary of Latimer’s life.
Bertha brings onto the domestic staff a new maid named Mrs. Archer. Ironically, this moment which managed to sidestep Latimer’s ability to peer into the future, becomes one of much greater significance than his Bertha/suicide vision. The arrival of Mrs. Archer seems to coincide with a lessening of the powers of “superadded consciousness.” And this reductive quality to his consciousness has what may well be a quite predictable consequence: paranoia. He quickly becomes convinced that his wife and her maid in engaged in some conspiratorial scheme against him. Eventually a situation which seems to be the exact opposite becomes clearer: the relationship between Bertha and her new maid seems to be taking the same course as that between Bertha and her husband. The birth of mutual hatred seems to be Bertha’s superpower. Even so, Bertha provides a seemingly genuine tenderness of attention when the older Mrs. Archer becomes very ill.
It is during this period of the story that an old friend from school shows up at Latimer’s door. Charles Meunier is portrayed throughout much of the first half of the book as not only Latimer’s closest friend, but his only friend. By the time Mrs. Archer’s illness seems to put her mortality in question, the two have not seen each for some years. Meunier is not just an old friend, however, but a physician. And he has a strange request of Latimer: permission to conduct a blood transfusion with her corpse immediately following her expiration. Latimer confers permission and the experiment is set to be carried out.
The transfusion occurs as Meunier’s fresh, thriving blood enters into the cold vessels of the dead Mrs. Archer. Her eyes open and a reanimated Mrs. Archer does a very odd thing. She looks at Bertha, lifts her half-dead/half-alive hand points a finger directly at the nearby Bertha. And then, just before she permanently collapses back into the afterworld inhabited only by the dead, she accuses Latimer’s wife of having hired her to poison her husband to death. The scene plays out to a terrified Bertha and a horrified Meunier. For Latimer, however, it was just another page in his diary: “horror was my familiar and this new revelation was only like an old pain recurring with new circumstances.”
Remarkably, what occurs between this scene which is truly deserving of being termed “a strange story of my experience” and the written recollection of it in his final testament many years later is recapped in just three short paragraphs. He and Bertha live separate lives that are the opposite circumstances of the first part of their marriage. She lives at home in splendor while Latimer travels around the world. None of the three witnesses to the scene implicating Bertha as a would-be conspirator to murder say anything about it anyone afterward. He spends only a short time in any one place because he eventually sees too much of the future of those with whom he has become acquainted. His superpower is destined to die along with the rest of him.
